How Leaderboards Work? A closer look at leaderboards in SCN

It’s been a two months since the launch of the gamification on SCN, during which the new “leaderboards” replaced the old “top participant lists” in each space. The new leaderboards come with exact numbers with which we hope we can introduce more transparency and encourage more engagement in the community.

The SCN Contributor Reputation Program FAQ updated at the launch already includes a pretty clear introduction of the leaderboards. What I want to do with this blog is to firstly draw some more attention to these new leaderboards in case you haven’t read the FAQ thoroughly, and secondly provide a little more insight on how the numbers are calculated.

The Top 20 SCN Members Leaderboard

I would like to start with the exception. The one leaderboard that is essentially different from all the others is located in the About SCN space, with the name “The Top 20 SCN Members Leaderboard”. And it’s different mainly in three aspects:

1) It’s calculated based on lifetime points on SCN. Just like the points shown on your masthead, your bio tab or reputation tab when you log onto SCN, these points don’t expire.

2) It’s calculated based on site-wide points on SCN. Again, just like the points shown on the masthead, bio tab or reputation tab, these points include all the points people have earned across the whole SCN. It’s thus often referred to as “the site-wide leaderboard” by us.

3) It has the “My Rank” tab. So the leaderboard not only shows the 20 people that have the most points, but also gives you an idea where you stand among the hundreds of thousands of SCN members.

Space Leaderboards

At this point, it’s probably easy for you to guess some of the mechanism underlying all the leaderboards besides the one introduced above. These leaderboards appear in each space (including About SCN) with the same name: “12-month leaderboard”. They share the following attributes:

1) Each leaderboard only counts points that are earned in the space where it lives.

2) Each leaderboard only counts points that are earned within a 12-month period.

3) There’s no “My Rank” tab.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the “12-month period” in the second attribute. In the old point system, as some of you may remember, we used rolling points across the community. It had the intention to reflect how active people were in an up-to-date fashion, but it was a little bit discouraging especially in the way it recalculated – a member would post a new piece of content just to find out he or she lost some points because the contribution triggered a recalculation. So how about the new 12-month leaderboard? Is the recalculation problem resolved?

The answer is yes. In the 12-month leaderboard, the point changes caused by contribution are instant. So as you can tell, a member still needs to remain active to stay in the leaderboard, but the appearance that points are lost when a contribution is made no longer occurs.

I hope this blog answers your questions about the leaderboards. Of course if you still have any, or you have any other ideas/suggestions related to ranking and leaderboards, we are here to listen.

10 Comments

The new point system is good, but I observed another change which happened over this transition. Prior to this the parent space used to aggregate the points we acquired in child spaces. But this is not happening in the new system. Is this change intentional ?

Some of the features which are missing for e.g. “My rank” should be there. Reason is very simple , I would always like to see my standing vis-a-vis leader board. Somebody in SCN doesn’t believe this as important but most of the community contributors would like to be featured in Leader board. If there is a poll around this, then it would definitely gets a

I work in the SCN Team and am responsible for reputation and gamification on SCN. I agree with you that we should have the “My Rank” tab in all leaderboards, unfortunately it is not a functionality that is offered by the platform. There is nothing we can do other than encouraging our platform providers (Jive and Bunchball) to provide in the near future.

Thanks for the feedback and for showing that you care about this feature!Laure

It’s good to see that you notice such differences Vinod, it means you really care about leaderboards! 🙂 The leaderboard in About SCN draws point information from all SCN, and not from a specific space, that’s what makes it different from the leaderboards in a space. And that’s where the bug is, the fact that the space leaderboard showing point information in the space only is not showing the “my rank” tab.Laure

Hi Laure, Thanks for your comments.Yes we do care about the boards. I feel members will care more about the My Rank tab in their space of interest rather than the overall SCN rank.

It would be great if SCN team can make this possible. This is a suggestion from my end, because that would be a kind of motivation to know where you stand among the other community members.

I am not sure if it is only observed my me. I generally open my space from bookmarks and keep my password remember check box checked login. So every day when I open the bookmark and click login the sign-on happens automatically. When I observe the leader boards on the left side during that time just immediately after the login happens, the My Rank Tab glances and goes off in respective space I am looking at. I am mentioning this so that it would help SCN team in investigating if this is possible by any chance. I use Mozilla browser.